It’s a transformation that shouldn’t be under-estimated. It has forced banks to think long and hard about pretty much everything they do. On the primary side, that includes client targeting, client on-boarding and engagement, client relationship management and cross-sell as well as product and geographic value-add. The all-things-to-all-people global investment bank is no more. What’s taking its place is a horses-for-courses environment where the starting point is that capital is a scarce and ex

John Langley Barclays John Langley is head of global finance and risk solutions at Barclays based in London, overseeing ECM, DCM, leverage finance, loans and risk solutions. He joined Barclays in 2006 to lead the EMEA risk solutions group and assumed global responsibility in 2011. He added joint responsibility for the global finance businesses in 2012, and took on his current role in 2014. Before Barclays, he spent 11 years at Merrill Lynch and started his IB career at Chase Manhattan Bank in 19

IFR: Welcome to this IFR Roundtable on the future of IBD. The purpose of today’s discussion is to address some of the key questions around where this industry is headed. The majority of discourse around regulatory and strategic change in the investment banking sector has been focused on the trading businesses so I thought it would be instructive for us to evaluate how it is affecting how the origination businesses as conducted by the major firms. It’s hard to have a conversation these days about

IFR: Mark, from your position as a service provider to the banks, how do you respond to some of the issues that have come up so far? Do the issues we’ve discussed so far reflect the key themes you confront when you talk to clients? Mark Rodrigues, Thomson Reuters: Yes. We’ve talked a lot about regulation and how that impacts business decisions and priorities and we’ve talked about funding, whether that is direct from shareholders or other markets, and the efficiency of the funding mechanism. But

IFR: On the issue of capturing emerging opportunities, is there a right way or a wrong way to set up your coverage function versus your product function versus your country function in today’s world? Are there models that tend to work better? William Vereker, UBS: It’s the right question to ask because the traditional investment banking business, as we discussed earlier on, is a very high ROE business. So the cost problem, per se, of a financial institution doesn’t for the most part lie in this